


Tear Down The Doors

by MelodyAR



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: But before that he spooks all of the assistants, Canon typical everything except the happy ending, Canon-Typical Pining, Canon-typical horror (probably less so), Character death will be mentioned but in a 'this happened in my timeline' way, Characters to be added, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, Joseph Meningitis exists but I dislike him, Look I know he's not an actual avatar but Lonely!Martin is so good, M/M, Martin tries to burn down the Archives, Misuse of Lonely powers, No beta we kayak like Tim, Other, Rated teen for swearing i guess, The Web is scheming but that's not relevant until like the third chapter, Time Travel Fix-It, Written before MAG196, so he will be mostly irrelevant, tags probably to be added, who will not die in this i promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29845197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelodyAR/pseuds/MelodyAR
Summary: It's been a rocky start to the archiving job, but they've settled into something resembling a routine. It's almost normal, except...Except someone is lingering around the archive and its staff, and they're getting nervous.Aka, Martin goes through the rift at Hilltop Road and tries to stop things from going all wrong. This plan goes all wrong.Title taken from Stray Italian Greyhound, which I heard in an amazing animatic ('grace' on YouTube) and instantly decided would be the theme song for anything containing season one Jon ever.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims & Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Tim Stoker, Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	Tear Down The Doors

**Author's Note:**

> I figured I'd try my hand at a time travel fic since I've read about 50 of the 80 on this website. The main points of this are already written but there are a couple I haven't figured out yet, so apologies if it doesn't work that well. Also, I wrote most of this before MAG196, which I say only because I'm ridiculously proud of how much I got right, especially some later bits revealed by MAG197. I'll hopefully finish this before MAG200, but I'm awful at commitment so no guarantees. It will be finished though!  
> Anyway, hope you enjoy!

“Hey, are you alright?” Sasha suddenly said, breaking conversation to look into a dim alleyway they were walking past.

Tim turned to see who she was talking to – it was hard to make out anything significant about the person themselves, but they had ivory white hair and were clutching a heavy-looking rucksack to their chest, burying their face in the fabric poking out of the top as they sat against the wall. They stiffened as Sasha called out to them, as if surprised they could be seen. After a few seconds, they seemed to realise Sasha wasn’t leaving, and responded in an aggressively fake accent.

“Fine, thank you,” the figure lifted their face slightly to make themselves heard, but it was still difficult to see them. “You two go on, don’t worry.”

Tim narrowed his eyes at that, turning to Sasha to see a mirrored look of suspicion on her face. Even putting aside the fact that the stranger must’ve been paying close attention to know that Tim was there, the low tone and fragile, unidentifiable accent made it difficult to believe they were simply drunk or homeless. They were clearly trying to hide their identity, made even more obvious by how they turned their head to look away, deeper into the alley.

“If you’re in trouble or something, we can help.” Tim said, slowly approaching the stranger.

“No.” 

Sasha frowned at Tim, gesturing for him to back away, but he shook his head and reached out to lay a hand on the person's shoulder. 

The reaction was quick, far more so than expected, and Tim went reeling back as they made a clumsy shove at his legs, knocking him off balance and nearly crashing into Sasha.

“Come on Tim, they don’t want us interfering. Let’s go.” she said as she grabbed his shoulder to steady him.

They turned to leave, but as they did so the stranger spoke up again. Their poorly crafted accent wavered between American and what must have been their natural voice, dropping hints of a clearly English background, and the forced deep pitch kept rising, but throughout the words there was an intense urgency, which gave it an unnerving quality as they said:  
“Curiosity will get you killed. Be more careful next time.”

It was hard to tell whether it was a threat, a warning, or some strange combination, but Tim and Sasha left too quickly to determine anything.

\--

A dead end. Martin had found nothing in Vittery’s flat, no clues to what had happened other than an honestly intimidating number of webs. Martin loved spiders, he really did, but what was in that flat had a malicious air to it, and despite the way he was kicking himself for not being able to find anything, he was quite glad to get out of there.

Not that he wouldn’t be returning later, obviously. He always hated telling Jon he’d come up empty; he knew rationally that Jon was harsher because Martin just wasn’t as good as Tim or Sasha at finding evidence – he didn’t have ‘special contacts’ or a talent for ‘digital exploration’, and ‘hard work and determination’ didn’t really compare, but he couldn’t help but take it personally. It felt awful to know Jon didn’t want him around. It didn’t help that he’d developed a tiny crush on him. Nothing that affected work, and it was easy enough to squash down when Jon made his sixth cutting remark about getting Martin out of the archives for a bit, but it did colour every interaction with an uncomfortable blend of sadness and stubborn hope.

So, armed with uneasiness and a knack for getting in where he wasn’t wanted, Martin had found a window he could squeeze in through when he returned later that night. He’d made a mental note of where it was, feeling more than a little proud of himself, and was just leaving when a cold pair of hands gripped his shoulders. He went still, partly out of fear and partly from the shock of just how incredibly, impossibly cold those hands were.

A low, blatantly fake voice came from behind him. He tried to turn his head but he couldn’t quite turn far enough to look at the person behind him, and their grip was strong, holding him still.

“Don’t follow up on Vittery. There’s nothing useful, and you don’t want to know what you’d find instead.”

“I- I’m sorry?” Martin stuttered. “How the hell would you know- who are you?”

The stranger relaxed their grip, perhaps sensing Martin’s fear, but it was still too tight. If he could catch them off guard, or play up the scared victim, maybe he could…

“It doesn’t matter who I am. Just believe me when I tell you that what will follow you home from that basement won’t be so considerate as to give you a warning.”

They let go suddenly, and Martin spun to face them, grabbing for a coat or scarf or anything to hold them in place long enough to get some straight answers.

His fingers met cold air, laced through with a thin fog. Winter had only just ended, meaning that he certainly wasn’t going to run screaming about ghosts, although Martin still found himself shaking with adrenaline. So much so, he almost missed the stranger walking away, too far to logically be the person he was looking for but the only person close enough to suspect. Their hair was white, like scared paper dipped in Tipex, and they carried a bulging rucksack as if they’d been hiking. Their shoes were muddy too, and that was all Martin could note before they stopped being there.

It wasn’t that they ran, nor that they blipped out of existence. It was simply that they had probably been there, and then Martin was certain he’d been alone the entire time.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that there hadn’t been any fog earlier though, especially not in London in early March, and decided that regardless of whether the man who brought the fog had existed, he would simply have to face Jon empty-handed tomorrow.

The thought of exploring Vittery’s basement made him shudder quite violently.

\--

Even Jon knew it was late. Everyone else had left the archives hours ago, and he was now forced to work by the light that flickered above his desk. He’d been meaning to fix it for a while, but it was at the bottom of a very long list of things to do and he had no reason to be using it that wouldn’t earn him a concerned look and a reminder not to overwork himself.

As a result, he almost managed to ignore the footsteps coming down into the archives by passing it off as the creaking swing of the ceiling light. Plus, it was dark outside the office, and he was a little way past the point where he would dismiss statements as ‘side-effects’ of exhaustion. There was nobody in the archives, and he continued trying to decipher the illegible handwriting of some drunk lunatic. He caught the word ‘zombie’ and sighed.

The creaking noise was slow. Jon avoided comparing its speed to the swinging of the light, avoided thinking about how deliberate it sounded, avoided considering the direction it came from. 

Then it stopped. Judging by the time between each creak and the number of times he heard it, the person would be halfway down the stairs – if he believed there was someone there, anyway. In that case, they would’ve probably just gotten their head down into the actual archives, coming into view of his office with the light still pouring out.

It was nothing, but Jon felt panic building in his stomach anyway. To occupy himself, he began trying to read the statement aloud. Perhaps it would make it easier to understand.

It did not. He could barely make it through a single word before having to pause and squint at the page. ‘Bud Lyghte’, as the statement giver had creatively named himself, probably didn’t have good handwriting when he wasn’t drunk off his ass, which he certainly had been while giving the statement. According to Sasha, he’d actually spent the hour it took him to get it all down sniggering. Jon didn’t even know why he was trying to transcribe it when it was immediately going into the disproven section, but there was a nagging curiosity to know what this man thought passed for a believable story.

Regardless of his success in reading the statement, it worked to assuage his (totally, entirely non-existent) fears about strangers coming into the archives for unknown reasons. Over the sound of his own voice he could almost ignore the sound of footsteps retreating into nothingness, and then the archive was quiet, aside from the gentle, squeaking swaying of the light in Jon’s office. 

\--

“Tell you what, me and Sasha had the weirdest experience the other day!” Tim said, swinging his legs beneath his desk.

“Sasha and I,” Jon corrected as he walked into the room. “And you three should be working.”

“It’s lunch! We’re on our lunch break, isn’t that right Martin?” Tim replied with a wide-eyed smile, turning to Martin with a thumbs up.

Jon looked at the clock. It read 10:30am, and Jon looked back at the two of them with raised eyebrows.

“Oh come on, then let me treat it like a statement. That’s work, isn’t it?” 

Jon’s face contorted into a grimace at that, and he sighed deeply.

“You’re not going to leave this alone, are you?” 

At Tim’s enthusiastic ‘nope!’, he sighed again and shook his head, gesturing for Tim to go ahead. With a grin, Tim launched into a dramatic retelling of the conversation he had with the stranger in the alley the other day, detailing the violent threats made against his person in a way that made Jon very glad it wasn’t time for lunch. As Tim was explaining the chase scene down winding paths, running from this faceless stranger, Sasha came in laughing.

“No offense Tim, but you’re awful at believable stories,” she teased. “Yes, we encountered an odd-looking stranger with a weird accent, then he made a vague threat when Tim approached him and we booked it. Martin, are you alright?”

Martin went quite pale when Sasha gave a more accurate account. Up until then he’d mostly dismissed the story as Tim having fun being overly gruesome, but when Sasha talked about the stranger so matter-of-factly, he felt a wave of nausea sweep over him as he recalled his own encounter the day before.

“Was the stranger… cold?” he asked hesitantly. Tim tilted his head with a worried expression before shaking it slightly.

“Oh. I don’t suppose they said anything about, um, knowing things you shouldn’t?”

At this, the other two assistants stiffened. Jon furrowed his brow, looking between them with an uncharacteristic concern. He began to say something, then seemed to think better of it.

“They said that curiosity would get us killed,” Tim muttered. “What were you told?”

“I wouldn’t want to find what was in Carlos Vittery’s apartment.”

There was an unease hanging in the air of the archives as the assistants discussed what they remembered of the stranger’s appearance – their voice, their mannerisms, what little could be determined about their appearance. On all counts, the stranger seemed to be the same person. By the time Jon chimed in with a reluctant story about footsteps far later than anyone else should’ve been in the archives (earning, as he suspected, a small request not to work too hard from Martin), they were all shaking hard enough for Sasha to turn on one of the space heaters by her desk. Nobody mentioned it.

“So, what, the archives have a stalker? I haven’t seen anyone matching what we know aside from that one encounter.” Martin said.

“I don’t think so,” Sasha said. “They didn’t seem to want to talk to us, and they apparently left as soon as they saw Jon was there. You’re the only person they actually sought out.”

Martin pulled a face at that, lips pulling tight in a nervous grimace.

“You know what this means…” Tim whispered, leaning in conspiratorially. “Stakeout.”

Jon began to protest, spluttering about work and professionalism and overreactions; Tim put a hand on his shoulder and kept talking.

“After work, we hide out in Jon’s office. They’re not watching the place since they didn’t know Jon was still there, so they shouldn’t notice we haven’t left. When they come down, we jump out, pin them down, get some questions answered.”

“How do you know they’ll come at all?” Sasha pointed out. Tim stopped, blinked, then finished with the same bravado as always.

“We’ll do it every night until they show up!”

Jon had further protests, as did Martin, but Sasha was happy enough with the plan and after a few minutes of debate (mostly done by Sasha and Jon) it was decided that they’d stay until half an hour after Jon had been there, and if nothing happened they’d do ‘the sensible thing’ as Jon put it and inform Elias.

**Author's Note:**

> I wonder who this stranger could possibly be. It's a mystery. An enigma. I'm so proud of myself for being so subtle with who they could be. Surely you have no idea.
> 
> Anyway, the actual story kicks in a bit more next chapter. I don't have an upload schedule so for now it's just 'when I feel like it' but I hope you enjoyed it so far!


End file.
